I know all of comics fandom has mocked Greg Land’s need to trace photo-reference as much as humanly possible. It is entirely possible that I might have done it once. So generally it is not worth pointing out how crap he is.

But.

Understand that these two panels, which indeed appear right next to another in the original comic, are supposed to show the same person. They don’t look anything alike. Guy A looks like the character is supposed to look – a handsome older gentleman with deep-set eyes and a weary brow. Guy B is a frigging male model with dramatically different facial features.

(Also, I guess somebody must have accidentally leaned against a light switch or something in between panels, what with that light source on the right side of his face disappearing just like that.)

Seriously, how hard is it to find two pictures of the same celebrity you’re tracing?

Top comment:Those panels seem to say that inside of every cold calculating white man (especially those evil crusty ones), is a smooth black man.— solid snake

I’m starting to think that Land is so aware of how reviled he is in the comic industry that he does shit like this just to fuck with people. I refuse to play his game of ‘Spot the “Reference”‘.

Josh: While I have no love for Land, having to read Fraction sends me screaming. Some of his stuff is ok, the Thor one shots he did, the early Punisher War Journal issues, Iron Fist (though I have a suspision that Brubaker was responcible for everything good about that series). But Fraction’s Uncanny is fucking aweful, further hurt by a bullshit artist like Land and hurting the careers of the Dodsons. Who I love, but refuse to buy some piece of shit Fraction wrote so that I can see the pretty pictures. The same goes for Hulk: great art, shit writing.

Actually, now that I’ve thought about it a lot of Marvel’s output is like that. Maybe it’s me.

potatocubed: It’s possible that Marvel has him under contract and it’s better for them to use him and sell some comics then fire him and have to deal with beaking contract. It’s also possible that people are retarted and like his art. People by Hulk after all, lots of people.

An intelligent person who doesn’t believe in magic in the Marvel universe is someone acting out of ignorance, not skepticism.

Magic isn’t exactly omnipresent in Marvel. The official line is that the general public believe Stephen Strange to be a crank along the lines of Uri Geller. If you don’t live in New York or Britain, you’re highly unlikely to see magic at first hand — and everything you hear about, up to and including Manhattan turning into hell on Earth, can be chalked up to those evil, dirty, baby-eating muties.

This is a reality where reality-warpers and alien invasions are scientific facts. That doesn’t leave much that can’t be explained by science.

I read the intro paragraph(s), and stared at the picture for a while. My initial thoughts were “Okay, that may be traced, but it’s actually fairly good artwork. I don’t see what the–wait, the dialogue… that’s supposed to be the same person speaking??”

I think the sad thing about this is that Land really CAN draw*. Just look at some of his Nightwing stuff. It’s just that sometime late in his DC work he started to really get into photo references…which lead to outright swipes in his Crossgen days … which lead to photoshopping porn at Marvel.

*Well that and the fact that every page of art he draws is work that could have gone to an artist that WANTS to work rather than just take lazy shortcuts.

My favorite game of “spot the photo-reference” was in The Road to Perdition. Richard Rayner used different photo models for the same character, and the models weren’t just a little bit different.

The protagonist was based upon one basic model for most of the story, who was nobody I could place. He has Kirk Douglas’s face on page 127. On page 135, he was Daniel Day-Lewis. On page 205, he’s Humphrey Bogart. Worse, these resemblances are very strong and very obvious. What makes it awesome is that those three men don’t look alike.

Beacon: *Well that and the fact that every page of art he draws is work that could have gone to an artist that WANTS to work rather than just take lazy shortcuts.

A page of art was produced. Does it matter what method was used to produce it? Or how long it took? Is the artwork inherently bad because the artist was able to draw it under an hour?

If you don’t like the final result, fine. I can certainly point to a LOT of panels, pages, whole books that just don’t work for me because the artist (IMHO) simply can’t draw people that look like people, or makes every person look the same (Infantino chins! Arrgh!), or I can’t tell what’s happening from one panel to another.

Now the end result may be not to my liking because of the method used. (When drawn comic characters are superimposed on photographed cityscapes it doesn’t make their world more real to me. Quite the opposite as it pulls me out of the story.) But I’d still see that as a problem with the end result more than with the method. Complain the artist didn’t achieve a desired result, not that they didn’t work hard enough to get there.

Sean D. Martin: Any asshole can paint Summer Glau blue and call her Nocture. You don’t get to call yourself an artist because of it and you sure as shit don’t get to get paid. He’s a fucking tracer. Were as every other artist at Marvel works hard penciling images every month, Land says “I’ll just take this pic of Jenna Haze, slap an X-Men uniform on her and call her Shadowcat”. You don’t see this kind of shit outside badly photoshopped porn. Why should Land get the credit when he’s doing work Marvel could pay a 12 year old to do? Not to mention it’s always the same twelve fucking images he traces over and over again. He’s a piece of shit who Marvel should have flushed a long time ago. Which only reinforces my contracted theory.

Sean, there are other artists who photoreference. Tony Harris is widely known for photographing entire scenes in advance and then drawing his comic work from the photographs, and of course there is always Alex “my next door neighbor is Superman” Ross.

But Harris and Ross aren’t lazy about their method as Land so obviously is. They take care to make sure that their use of photoreference serves to make the story more accessible and easier to read. Land just traces whatever the fuck is at hand, seemingly, with no care for narrative structure or storytelling.

On a tangent here, I wish the people Tony Harris uses for photo reference didn’t look like they were overacting all the time. Seriously, am I the only one that thinks his character drawings need to cut down on the mugging and the hand-talking?

Lister Sage: Sean D. Martin: Any asshole can paint Summer Glau blue and call her Nocture. You don’t get to call yourself an artist because of it and you sure as shit don’t get to get paid.

Actually, if hired to paint a picture of Glau Nocture and that’s what you turn in then, yes, you sure as shit do get to get paid.

Look, I’m not sure I ever even heard of Land before MGK’s mention. I’ve probably seen his work but the name rang no bell for me. So I’m not out to defend the guy because I’m familiar with him, his work or anything. I’m just taken aback my the apparent vehemence with which his working methods are attacked.

There is absolutely a gray area between criticizing someone’s result and the method used to achieve it. “The art sucks because he’s using a bad brand of ink that comes out gray instead of black.” “This casserole would be far better it it didn’t taste like the copper pan you cooked it in. Use ceramics next time.” etc. So saying you don’t like the finished product because of the way in which it was produced has some validity.

But the objection many folks seem to have is that he sucks because of his method and not because of the results that method produces. And that (most WTF?-ing of all) since he didn’t meet some standard of working hard enough he therefore doesn’t deserve to be paid.

MGK: Land just traces whatever the fuck is at hand, seemingly, with no care for narrative structure or storytelling.

It’s not his method. It’s his work ethic.

Then folks should comment on his narrative structure or storytelling and objections should be more on the “I can’t follow what is going on” end of the spectrum (as, certainly, several here are) and not at “He doesn’t work hard enough.”

And if it is all about work ethic, then if Ross were just Mozart-ly talented and able to toss off six pages of creative gorgeousness in 20 minutes should he be similarly criticized because he’s being lazy? I mean, if he could do that in 20 minutes imagine what he could accomplish if he actually worked at it?

I dunno, I like Harris’ mugging. If you’re drawing a mostly-talky project like Ex Machina, the acting works a lot better than Bendis-style talking heads.

Foxhack: Marvel has to publicly say they don’t condone tracing off of copyrighted photos, esp. when you’ve got the King of Spain threatening litigation. But given how much of their product now relies on the stuff (it sells!), I would suspect their actual policy is something other. Especially when you’ve got artists like Deodato and Larocca, who hadn’t done it in the relatively recent past, now relying on celebrity photo-reference.

Agreed that Land should at least make a token effort to keep his character faces consistent. That sample above is just…gah.

Sean: Let me take a crack at this. Land’s “Method” is a target because the method that he uses (i.e. “lightboxing” or “tracing” or “swiping from porn”) results in bad comics. If the casserole is bad bacause it was cooked in a lead pot and the lead leached into the food and posioned people then, yes, you would be at fault for a poor end result BECAUSE OF your method.

Nobody criticizing an artist because that artist uses his or her left hand, but if an artist used his or her left hand and the comic was unreadable then they are right to criticize the result the followed the method, wouldn’t they?

MGK’s post is critical of Land because Land’s work hurts the narrative of that comic because it’s confusing that the person in the first panel is supposed to be the same person in the second as they do not look at all alike and are in different lighting conditions. This is the case BECAUSE Land’s method requires that to be the case as he did not have, or could not be bothered to find, consistant photo references of one person in two different perspectives. That a reader would have to wonder if this is a different speaker in panel two, and thus break the flow of dialogue and story, is what makes Land a shitty artist and storyteller.

I would also like to say that Land’s method makes and action scene pretty terrible, becasue everyone looks posed (because they are) and static, and generally lack any of the action that by and large defines superhero comics.

John, like I said, it can be difficult to comment on the result without also noting the method used. Particularly when the result is due to the method used.

And from that approach your comments are spot on and I agree with them. His action scenes look terrible because he’s using posed figures. Because he’s using different “models” for each panel his characters are inconsistently drawn.

In short, his storytelling is bad because of the method he uses. But this starts (as it should) with the end result and then extends any criticism to the tools/methods which may have made any better result unlikely. It doesn’t start with his method and say it’s inherently bad.

If someone were able to tell a compelling, well done story using traced photos I think complaining that “Yeah, but they traced them.” would be seen to be an unfounded complaint.

Just a few quick things to sum this up.
A. Those panels seem to say that inside of every cold calculating white man (especially those evil crusty ones), is a smooth balck man. Can’t really explain that one, hope somebody can though.
B.He’s a goddam tracer. It ruins those narrative when crap like that happens.
C.What happens if that fucktards’ photoshop breaks? I myself would like to see this happen.
D.He’s a goddam tracer. This needs reiterated, sorry.
E.Since he’s a goddam tracer why doesn’t he just counterfit money instead? it probably pays more.
F. If he dies will they need a photoreference to trace a chalk outline around his goddam corpse? In the interest of justice I fucking hope so and I hope they take a picture while doing so.
G. It is STD’s not STI’s.

Heres the deal. If you go back far enough you’ll find comics where Land shows he can ACTUALLY FUCKING draw. Since then he gets put on top tier books where he traces shit out of magazines or porn or who the hell knows what. AND NOT IN ANY CONSISTENT MANNER. Look at those two panels. Same character, “drawn” so it looks like TWO different people. If Wolverine was always Kurt Angle or whoever else Land uses it would at least be consistent. Lazy as hell, but consistent. Land is a crap artist. I can’t recall whether he used to be any good, but at least he put in some fucking effort…

I’m sorry, I just don’t see how anyone can argue that a tracer should be paid as or even remotely considered an artist. I can trace like a motherfucker, as can just about anyone with basic motor skills and a pencil, but I would not trace someone else’s Batman and try to get DC to hire me as a new Batman artist. If I trace a well-written, compelling Batman story from someone else’s well-drawn Batman story, I still suck. Luckily, all I can draw is stick figures, and that’s totally without tracing Randall Munroe OR Sam Brown, bitches!